A new artificial intelligence is turning its big brain to mapping earthquake aftershocks.
Scientists trained an artificial neural network to study the spatial relationships between more than 130,000 main earthquakes and their aftershocks. In tests, the AI was much better at predicting the locations of aftershocks than traditional methods that many seismologists use, the team reports in the Aug. 30 Nature.
Although it’s not possible to predict where and when an earthquake will happen, seismologists do know a few things about aftershocks. “We’ve known for a long time that they will cluster spatially and decay over time,” says geophysicist Susan Hough of the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, Calif., who was not an author on the new study.